People do good because they are
human,
not because they are religious!

Do not give God any credit for the good they do, they did it!

Should you kill a violinist by disconnecting him from your body if it
is keeping him alive?

The violinist argument is interesting. Its point is that if a baby has
a right to life that right cannot equal or trump the right of a woman to make
choices about her own body. The baby that is not viable outside the womb is
essentially on life support. Life support can be switched off. If a woman is keeping a violinist alive by
being hooked up to him for nine months she can disconnect herself though she
knows it will kill him. So she has the right to disconnect the child from
her body.

I would add that even if she has to knife him to get free she has that right.
If she has this right over somebody outside her body who is joined to her
imagine what right she has if he could be put inside her even if it would do her
no obvious harm!

The argument is based on how nobody has the right to save their
life by taking an organ from you to live even if it does you little harm and if
you do not consent or you do consent and change your mind. It is
about the principle. You cannot force a woman to donate her body to having a
baby any more than you can force her to donate an organ. So the argument
has implications for abortion.

Judith Jarvis Thomson, the creator of the violinist argument, maintained that
a baby having a right to life in the womb does not in itself prove abortion
wrong. Just as a woman can disconnect herself from the violinist and kill him by
negligence or indirectly so she has the right to end a pregnancy - to cut off
the supply her body makes to the unborn baby.

Somebody told a parable that helps see what Thomson was
getting at. A robot can take eggs from young women by force but fertilise
them with their consent. One young woman's egg was accidently fertilised
without her consent. In that case the machine will tear the baby to death
at some stage perhaps even up to when the baby is ready to be "born". The
girl can have the baby removed and implanted in her womb to save it.
Should she? What if she was a clairvoyant and knew the baby would be one
of the biggest life savers ever in the world? What if the baby would be an
ordinary person?

Is she bound to donate her body to carry the baby?

Or is she bound to refuse to let her body be treated as
an incubator?

Or is it up to her for either scenario is bad?

A baby is killed if nothing is done. She still is the
cause of its death whether directly or indirectly. Direct or indirect does
not matter when she knows what the result will be. It is obvious that it
is up to her to decide if she is going to be a donor or an incubator. That
trumps the baby's right to life and even its right not to suffer.

So we see the pro-choice argument is right. Is it really that
important in that light if the baby was conceived on purpose or by accident?
No. There is a difference but not a chasm. There is no morally significant
difference for it is still all about, "Should a woman be made to carry a baby
she does not want using her body any longer?"

If cancerous tumours routinely developed brains and ended
up at the level of say four month foetuses we would have no problem aborting
them. The reason we have no problem is that the person has a right not to be
forced to be a body donor.

The violinist argument suggests that the woman's desire
is important. The more she wants to be free from the violinist the more
right she is to let him die. So desire is an important matter in deciding
the morality of abortion.

One problem is the argument works best with
self-administered abortion! It becomes a problem if a woman has a right to
choose but the baby also has a right to life WHEN somebody else has to perform
the abortion! A right to control your body does not give somebody else a
duty or right to help you if they have conscience objections.

One problem with the violinist argument is that it seems to make sense as long
as you think of the violinist not as you but as somebody else. You would hate
that argument if it was saying you should be the violinist. Pro-life
people say that people are not putting themselves in the place of the unborn
baby.

To that it may be answered that most of us it can make sense in a Darwinian
sense. The fact is you are not the violinist and the unborn baby so there
is something selfish in it.

You are the violinist. It is argued that unless I am to blame for you
being ill nobody has the right to take blood from me by force to save your life
even if there is no other way. If I am responsible then I have no right to
refuse because I am responsible for you needing my blood in the first place.
What if you needed my body for some magical reason? The answer is still
yes. Notice how even a little blood is put before saving a life?
Whatever we have proven we have certainly proven that nobody can prove
abortion is wrong. Banning abortion only makes sense if the unborn child's
life is sacred. But is the violinist's life sacred? If it is then it
is not treated as such and we feel it should not be so we cannot say we are sure
abortion really is wrong.

All that seems to suggest that if the mother is to blame for her unborn
baby's illness then she cannot have an abortion. The argument that a woman is
the cause of her being pregnant because she had sex freely and sex leads to
pregnancy implies that abortion might be allowed in rape. If the
mother was the cause of her unborn child being sick then abortion would be
banned as well.

Is banning abortion bad in so far as it has to pass over the woman's right to
her own body? Even if you are against abortion and you are right to it is
obvious that your overriding the woman's right over her body is a necessary
evil.

It is said that abortion is a human issue not a gender issue. It is both.
Sometimes it is more of a gender issue. When a woman is raped the man can
get no consideration if she has to terminate the pregnancy. She is having
an abortion to assert that she has the right not to let men procreate by rape.
As the desire of the woman for an abortion is very important it overrides the
desire of the male for her to stay pregnant. He is not donating his body.
She is.

What about men, the fathers
of these babies lined up for abortion? It is felt that men have a
responsibility for the foetus but not the right to make decision about its
future.

The foetus unlike one of us does not have a concept of its future and horror
that its life is going to be taken so by no means can any abortion be equated
with murder. Very few consider a woman rejoicing over her miscarriage as
being on a par with a woman who is delighted that her newborn dies.

The foetus is part of the mother but not just a part and has no potential to
live apart from her. Life by itself does not establish a right to life. A kidney
may be killed.

It is only medicine that makes pregnancy a good thing. In itself it is very
dangerous for the woman and that is why a lot of human intervention is needed.
Nature does not care and cannot care for it is what it is. Women's bodies are
poorly "designed" for pregnancy which is why there would be a lot of deaths if
nature had its way. It is more science that brings a baby safely into the
world than anything else. It is more science than anything else that looks
after the woman. The violence of pregnancy against the woman is critical
when you are trying to formulate an argument for abortion based on the woman's
right to decide for her own body.

Religion will say that if a woman had the right to make her body stop feeding
her unborn baby and thus cut off its life support she still has no right to
stick a needle in to kill it or get somebody else to do it. There is a
difference between using a weapon or just turning of a machine keeping the other
person alive. Or so it says. But that is splitting hairs. A
dead body still exists at the end of it. And if she could stop her womb
feeding her baby by willpower what about how this would be crueller than using a
lethal injection? Pain has to matter.

We conclude that one thing is certain. The religious doctrine that life
should never be taken is sanctimonious virtue signalling nonsense.
The violinist argument encourages us to feel that abortion should be permitted
in cases of rape or when the mother’s life is in danger from the pregnancy. Religion is wanted by the world for protecting life but its logic is awry so it
is no real help.